Cry Havoc Read online

  After all, what are we? If not the bodyguard of a politician going home?

  Unable to stop myself, I remember an ex-President of Sierra Leone I once lunched with, at the Italian next to Colonel David Stirling’s old offices in South Audley Street. These days, that Italian is George’s, owned by the Birleys.

  This old boy had been elected President, but had later fled guerrilla insurgents. By the time of his having pitched up at our offices – sometime in 1989 or thereabouts – he was working as a Heathrow baggage handler.

  At lunch, I was tired and bored. Of course, he had no money. Of course, neither did we. Bolshie, I sat watching him. Then I leaned across the table: ‘I’ll do it for you.’

  He grinned at me.

  ‘I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, without money. I’ll go into the jungle, recruit a few men and work my way to Freetown from there.’

  His grin widened.

  ‘Step by step…’ I was talking his language ‘… but I have one need from you. I cannot do without.’

  Less grin. ‘And what is that, Captain Mann?’

  ‘That you come into the jungle with me … all the way … to victory … to Freetown.’

  Bullshit fled. The grin had gone. We didn’t hear from the arsehole again. He wanted his Presidency back. But for free.

  Moto is different. I like Moto. He seems astute, assured, sincere. He is good enough for what’s afoot. He’s committed to democracy. He doesn’t believe in eating people. A progressive leader.

  Next, for a laugh, I try him with the curse of the twin skulls. A Fang belief that, if you take power wrongly, as Obiang did, by the murder of his uncle, then the curse will be on you. It will lead to Obiang’s downfall. The joke – to some – is that Obiang’s two sons fit the curse so well. Medieval Europe is the best model by which to look at African politics. Succession is the flash-point.

  But Moto switches off, then and there. No curse. Looks upset.

  Mustafa – who doesn’t know about the curse – looks cross. Also because the twin skulls had come as a surprise to him too. I suppose that Moto – Man of God – doesn’t go in for sangoma spells. The rattling of dried monkey balls. But this is West Africa. All religion is powerful, voodoo the more so. Home-brewed mischief.

  Later, after Moto and his aide leave, Mustafa slaps his hand on his thigh. Shoves his cigars into a glass ashtray the size of a dinner plate. All’s well. He has good news for the Boss. His investors, his mercenary soldier and his figurehead El Presidente have all got on. Mustafa has booked a table for lunch. We leave the hotel and jump straight into the three hovering black Mercedes limos.

  They’re all for us: it’s Mustafa the gangsta rappa. I love it, of course. But I don’t fail to see red flashing lights.

  The restaurant is super-rich only. Tables are out on the boulevard pavement. The valet lackeys would be shocked if we didn’t pitch up in a fleet of limos. Princess Dolly and all. As we parade our way to the table, I can’t help but hear the Maitre d’ greet Mustafa, by name. His lost son.

  When the food ordering and wine tasting rigmarole is all done, I lean to Mustafa’s ear. ‘Mustafa – our security – why don’t we set up a website, you know? “Eg.coupsters.com”, something along those lines?’

  He peers at me over the rim of his wine glass. ‘What’s up Simon?’ he asks, looking bemused, before taking a long, lazy mouthful of vintage Rioja.

  ‘Well… You booked me into the Majestic in my name. You’re checked in using yours. Anyone could have clocked Severo Moto strolling in and meeting us, the mercenary soldier and the millionaire businessman. Then there’s this lunchtime circus…’

  I pan the street, pavement, restaurant. ‘I’d say we’re about as covert as a remake of the chariot race in Ben Hur.’

  Mustafa puts his glass down. He eyes me. He is a diamond buyer squinting through his loupe. How does it go: Carats – Colour – Clarity – Cut?

  ‘Have a drop of wine, Simon. Stop worrying,’ he tells me.

  That winds me up tighter.

  Mustafa takes aim. ‘Of course the Spanish … er … CESID* have seen us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘CESID – Spanish intelligence … they know.’

  For God’s sake. What the fuck is going on here?

  ‘Spain are backing the coup,’ smiles Mustafa, ‘and have promised to give the Boss immediate de facto international recognition to Moto’s interim government.’

  The words sink in. For this Op, such recognition is a sine qua non. A formality without which there is nothing. Spain is the former colonial power of EG. If the Spanish recognise Severo Moto’s interim government as legitimate, then the EU and the US will follow.

  Mustafa went on. ‘They want to send in a thousand Guardia Civil, as soon as Moto is in there, to ensure a peaceful handover of power.’

  Mustafa’s thin smile wipes itself away. ‘But we must not let that happen. That would leave Spain too powerful in the new EG, ourselves less so.’

  My mind spins. Yes. It’s the Iraq invasion line-up, but guess what? Here we all are again.

  There has been no cloak and dagger in Barcelona, and now I know why. This is Spain’s own Op, and that means that it is also a CIA Op. After all, a nod is as good as a wink, if you’re a blind horse. Isn’t it?

  I feel my body uncoil. This is good news.

  In Angola, we were working with the democratically elected government. In Sierra Leone we were working towards democracy, with those in power. This EG Op isn’t like that. The operation is against the status quo. We’re with the rebels. The Op is against the heads. Much riskier.

  Not now. Not with a fucking King on board. I drink the wine. Uncoil some more.

  Then Mustafa tells me there are rumours that Obiang is ill. One of our investors is getting this from Obiang’s personal surgeon in the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville. Hippocratic Oath country.

  If Obiang dies before we get in there, then we may be out of business. Our going in then would add to the no doubt already messy power struggle. Chaos. We’ll do it if we have to, but it isn’t first prize. The illness routine may or may not be true. In Angola, President Dos Santos used to pull his ‘I’m about to die’ stunt every eighteen months or so. It was a game: always useful for winning the hearts of the povos – or so he believed – and for gassing out of the woodwork the many plotters who would be the next El Presidente.

  Then there is the curse of the twin skulls mumbo jumbo. If nothing else, that tells me that there is a strong likelihood – at any given moment – that other interests inside the borders of EG might mount a successful coup of their own. That too would spell disaster: if anyone is to overthrow this government, it’s gotta be us.

  ‘Time is of the essence,’ says Mustafa.

  This I’ve longed to hear. Investor urgency – an understanding that we must be swift once we start to roll – tastes sweeter than the vintage Rioja. A breakthrough. The investors have at least grasped the heart of how to do this.

  Then Iqmad turns and says something to me. My ears are damaged – from high-velocity rifle fire – and the traffic noise doesn’t help. I ask him to say again.

  ‘What’s your favourite?’ he asks, in a conspiratorial undertone.

  For God’s sake. That’s what I thought he had said the first time. Is he gay? I look at him. Quizzing. Maybe he is.

  ‘Favourite what?’

  ‘You know…’

  I don’t. I shake my head. ‘No.’

  ‘You know…’ He glances down at his hand, held below the table height. He must be gay. Favourite? Favourite what? Favourite cock?

  Then I see it: he’s holding his hand as though it’s a handgun. Then it dawns on me: the boy’s a gun nut, a wannabe.

  I laugh. ‘No. No favourite … just so long as it works.’

  I can see that this isn’t going to work. I look serious. ‘But really: you can’t do better than a 9mm Browning – you know – that’s the SAS basic weapon.’

  His face told me that you could do much
better.

  ‘But an HK MP7 is really good.’

  Iqmad brightens up at that. He rattles off a load of gun nut stuff. I listen politely.

  What a happy bunch of Coupsters we are.

  I tell my new partners our proposed coup will need planning. Pricing. For that reason, my next move is a trip to South Africa. Soon. There I can make contact with the same men I had first met in London in the Eighties.

  At that time, they had been soldiers in the SADF. They had been officers, but they had been working in Europe undercover: to bust import sanctions against the Apartheid regime.

  When, in 1993, the Angolan government had first transferred money to Tony Buckingham and me, to mount the Soyo Op, we had gone to two of those men, now in Pretoria, South Africa: Eeban Barlow and Larnie Keller. The four of us had then founded Executive Outcomes, using an off-the-shelf shell company of that name already owned by Barlow. Tony and I had made sure that we were never directors, employees or shareholders of EO. Everything has always been on a handshake. We tell them what to do. We pay them for doing it.

  EO has become something extraordinary, and frightening, to many people (and governments) in Africa and beyond. Then – on 31 December 1998 – after victory in Angola, and victory again in Sierra Leone – it was disbanded entirely.

  The people I now need to see are my old EO crowd.

  Lekker. Like a krekker!

  *CESID – Centro Superior de Informacion de la Defensa

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1993: ANGOLA

  Like nowhere else on earth. Overrun with Barrel Boyz, desperadoes, gun-runners, Portuguese and a multi-national menagerie of misfits, fighting to expand vile political creeds (China, Cuba, South Africa), and old Cold War superpowers clinging to fading glory (USSR and the US).

  The Cold War’s last hurrah. A fireworks party. And Star Wars’ Last Chance Saloon. Driving all this chaos and violence were Angola’s fuck-off riches. In Angola, it’s about oil. Lots. It’s about diamonds. The best.

  Angola had been ravaged by civil war for two decades. Half a million people had died. Four million had been displaced. That civil war started in 1975, when the Portuguese, beaten by the guerrilla war for independence, fled.

  The civil-war fighters were the governing MPLA – the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – versus UNITA, the anti-Marxist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

  In 1975, backing the MPLA were the Soviet Union, with their running dog Cuba. Backing UNITA were the US, China, France and their paper-tiger running dog South Africa. Angola had been the Cold War’s hottest proxy war. More than once I was shocked to see – from the air – miles of burned-out Russian tanks. They looked like the relics of a World War II battle. A Kiev. You couldn’t go to the battlefields on the ground. Achtung Minen.

  The fighting had been very bad. Vast areas were still No Go owing to these anti-tank minefields and booby-trapped anti-personnel mines. In great tracts of forest no bird sang. They’d all been eaten. Russian KGB Alpha troops had fought in the front line against their CIA equivalents: Delta. Greek alphabet soup.

  Cuban had fought South African. At one point, the SADF had been within 20 kilometres of Luanda, before being ordered – by their proxy war masters the CIA, in Langley, Virginia – to halt. Turn round.

  The White House had woken up to what the CIA were about to pull off – an outright victory, by means of the white South African Apartheid regime. The White House had come to its senses.

  Our EO South Africans loathed the US for that betrayal. The cup of victory, for their hard-fought campaign, had been snatched from their lips by a bunch of fat suits in Washington. Or so they believed. The CIA weren’t happy either. Langley had invested big time in Angola. Clout. Money. Blood. Pride. History.

  (One CIA man that I knew was Chris Garner. I knew him through Nicholas Elliott. Garner used to plot at David Stirling’s Mayfair offices. The Seychelles were a perennial target for Garner. He often used to brag about the Angolan visa stamped in his US passport. The stamp was UNITA, the signatory Jonas Savimbi.)

  Then everything changed.

  The so-called South African Border Wars of 1966–89 – over lands disputed with Angola and Namibia – were ended. On 31 May 1991, in Lisbon, Angola’s President José dos Santos and UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi signed the Bicesse Accords, which laid out a transition to multi-party democracy, under the supervision of the UN. This had come about after the Trojan negotiations of Chester Crocker, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa under President Ronald Reagan, and architect of its ‘Constructive Engagement’ approach. Under the Accords, all foreign troops and support for the war had to pull out of Angola.

  The MPLA and UNITA troops were to come into UN demob camps and disarm. A new Angola Armed Force – the Forcas Armadas de Angola (FAA) – was to be formed, using men from both armies. After the entire population had been given photo ID cards, there were to be free and fair (and supervised) elections.

  After two decades of carnage, Angola stood on the threshold of peace.

  The Bicesse Accords also expedited the dismantling of the Apartheid regime and the old SADF. More specifically, under pressure from African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela, the buckling regime of South African President F.W. de Klerk agreed to disband the SADF’s notorious Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a unit that carried out the government’s dirtiest covert and clandestine work.

  Quite a few of EO’s best came straight out of the CCB. Do not pass Go! Do not collect your pension! Join EO!

  On 29–30 September 1992, Angola held Presidential and Parliamentary elections. The MPLA secured 129 of the 200 National Parliament seats, UNITA 70. In the Presidential election, José dos Santos secured 49.57 per cent of the votes, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi 40.6 per cent. Savimbi rejected the result, claiming the election had been rigged – the familiar African reaction to a drubbing at the polls.

  Terrible things happened in Luanda next, as news of the election result came through. UNITA supporters and staff were hunted down and slaughtered. Savimbi himself narrowly escaped.

  Using the massacres as their immediate cause – however it was that those massacres really came about – UNITA resumed the civil war. What triggered the massacres is still in dispute. MPLA are sure, and I agree, that the massacres were part of a plan set up in order to give UNITA a plausible cause for going back to war. They did.

  Now supposedly without their Cold War backers, both the MPLA and UNITA needed to source money to continue fighting.

  UNITA – which controlled two thirds of Angola’s fabulous diamond fields – sold millions of US dollars’ worth of uncut stones to diamond merchants. The MPLA sold billions of pounds’ worth of offshore crude oil, for which the operating base was Soyo.

  Barrel Boyz’ Christmas.

  When UNITA attacked Soyo in January 1993, it was an attack on the MPLA’s jugular. For the MPLA, the loss of Soyo spelled the end. For me it spelled the beginning. Tony fired me, but I asked that we fight back. Against UNITA. For the MPLA government. To save our business. Our phone calls from Belgravia to Luanda and Joaquim David followed.

  Let us take Soyo back.

  So it was: and as JD had proposed, the President’s Gulfstream flew us to Luanda. We were nervous. To our utter amazement, we discovered on arrival that our proposal had been hastily accepted.

  A strange meeting took place, when JD introduced Tony and me to General João de Matos, Chief of Staff of the FAA. De Matos had to ask us, so he did: ‘But how will you carry out this attack?’

  DM, as he was known, was young, good-looking, mixed blood. A large man, a little overweight. Known to be very brave, to the point of foolhardy. Cool, quiet. Perhaps shy, or disdainful. His combat fatigues clean and pressed, boots polished. Always smoking.

  ‘Simon. Answer the General, please.’

  JD nodded at Tony’s order. His hospital pass. Tony knew I hadn’t a clue. How could I? Without INT. Without any recce.

  ‘
A classic Special Forces coup de main attack, sir,’ I bullshitted. Then shut up. Nobody challenged me. Nobody said a word for long minutes. Nobody wanted to admit they didn’t know what that was either.

  Later, DM had asked what we needed. As part of my list, I asked for defence stores. DM interrupted: ‘What do you mean by defence stores exactly?’

  ‘Barbed wire, coils of Dannet, picks, spades, axes, right-angle pickets, wire cutters, wiring, gloves, sandbags, sheets of CGI…’

  A hand holding a burning cigarette halted me. ‘Let me tell you about African defence…’

  I nodded that he should.

  ‘We attack. They run away…’

  I smiled. Arrogance? Or pride in his troops?

  ‘…then … they attack. We run away.’ De Matos smiled at my not knowing whether to laugh. He waved his cigarette through the air.

  ‘Angola is a big place… Why defend somewhere to the end, when there is so much else to run away in?’

  But it was the MPLA that was running away now. The war was going very badly. It was UNITA who were taking the places that must be held. Soyo was a damaging loss: it attacked the credibility which the all-important oil companies accorded the MPLA government.

  MPLA control. Barrel Boyz’ confidence.

  Our military meeting ended. A business meeting began. Now Tony went in to bat.

  Everything started happening at lightning speed. We flew to Windhoek in the President’s jet. There we were to switch to scheduled. The President’s jet would be too visible in South Africa. This plan backfired because, in Windhoek’s terminal building, we bumped into half of G Squadron, 22 SAS. All ex. They had seen us come off the biz jet.